


They Never Do

by Bellzandtrinkets



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Bad coping mechanisms, Hurt No Comfort, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-08-30 03:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16757104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bellzandtrinkets/pseuds/Bellzandtrinkets
Summary: Being stuck in close quarters means thinking about things. And thinking about things can be difficult, and really kind of ugly when you're Whirl.





	They Never Do

**Author's Note:**

> So this was utterly Jossed by Lost Light, but I liked what I had so I decided to post it. This was written immediately after issue 7, was jossed ny 13, but is mostly just Whirling and being sad.

Sharing a room wasn’t his idea. 

That’s what he keeps saying. 

He keeps saying it over and over again. 

Approximately no one seems to believe him, which would’ve set him off years and miles ago, but Rung just pats him on the claw absently, and Rodimus just ignores his protests when diviing out more of their dwindling rations on the way back to the bigger ship. Skip still isn’t big enough for any of their purposes and Brainstorm hasn’t stopped complaining about sharing a room with Rewind and Chromedome since they got on board, but it’s big enough to have just the two of them. They’re both flyers and they both take up a ridiculous about of space, and no matter how well he can pull his wings in, it doesn’t make him able to take up less space. It’s never meant he’d take up less space, even when he wanted to. Even when he’d have rather disappeared into nothingness, it didn’t matter. 

But. Point. 

It wasn’t his idea. 

Or maybe it was. 

The longer this goes on the more he thinks it is. 

Cyclonus recharges like the offline, and it makes him lean over and occasionally attempt to shove Cyclonus off the berth because t’s unsettling and it makes him think that maybe the idiot has officially figured out how to knock himself into some offline mode and he gets paranoid in the middle of the night cycle. Whirl himself doesn’t recharge well, and never has. Or at least he hasn’t in so long he can’t remember when there was another option. 

He tinkers and fidgets and has pulled apart and put back together all sorts of things from across Skip to the point of making everyone else nervous. He used to be able to put things back together by touch. He can’t anymore, but if he cycles his optic off and he thinks about it very hard he can sometimes remember where all the parts go and get them back in the right order. 

it means a lot of time alone with the sounds of his own mechanisms and the sounds of Cyclonus’s in the dark, but it’s better than if he thinks about it too much. 

For all that he doesn’t recharge, it’s hard to get Cyclonus to stop. If he’s not paying attention then he’ll watch Cyclonus recharge through cycle after cycle and once he waited to see how long it could last and he couldn’t even wait that long because after too long he suddenly was reminded of Springer and how he’d just stayed still forever and Roadbuster’s incessant reading started playing in the back of his head and he’d gone and practically torn the recharge line to make him wake up and glare with his stupid hole face because it was better than nothing and he’s stopped waiting anymore. 

Rung says it’s a reaction that’s perfectly natural. 

All of it is. 

Rung might not be his therapist anymore, but Rung is….Rung is his friend. They’re friends. And Rung sometimes will just talk him through his own head. He might like it better now that Rung has stopped taking notes and has stopped being overly share-y with the rust sticks. He’ll sit there and eat half the box while Whirl talks at him and only offer once or twice and it feels better that way. 

Better than it did. 

But it doesn’t really help with Cyclonus who has basically stopped talking to people again.

Except him. 

Gross. 

All of these stupid feelings are gross. 

If he was the type to feel bad, he might’ve, just because there’s a little tiny voice in the back of his head that tells him ‘hey you totally had a huge hand…heh… in making things so somber’ and he can’t figure out what he feels between being angry that the voice isn’t dead yet, or being uncomfortable because it’s right. 

Because he did. 

-

“See, there was this big giant idiot” He starts, because there is nowhere else to start.

Of course Tailgate interrupts, his little hands curling on the edge of the berth

‘Why are you calling them an idiot, this is a love story, right, so they’re the-‘

“Shhhhh, listen to the storyteller.” His attempt at shushing sounds more like ruined static, but Tailgate acts like it’s normal. Tailgate acts like he’s just another mech. Tailgate isn’t scared of him. Sure, he’s called him names and poked and prodded, but Tailgate isn’t afraid of him. He probably should be. “You know how this goes. Don’t princess bride me, I don’t have the time.”

“…Okay.” He sits on his hands, tipping that helm and looking at him with those big blue optics.

“…Okay.” Whirl looks at him. He’s such a weird bright thing in the universe and Whirl can kinda see what Cyclonus sees in him if he looks hard enough.

He doesn’t want to look right now.

“See, once upon a time, there was this big giant idiot. He didn’t know how to say things, so he thought no one should ever say stuff so no one made him look bad.”

Whirl holds his claws wide.

“Now, this isn’t just your run of the mill idiot, he’s a big dumb one, because he went and fell horribly terribly stupidly in love. The big ridiculous kind you hear in stories, like this one, where true love conquers all, but in this story it doesn’t because that slag isn’t real, and this story is set in the real world, okay?”

Tailgates optics get huge. He’s following. Whirl can tell.

“Now the big dumb idiot has gone and fallen for a much shorter, smaller one.-“

Tailgate puffs up like he’s going to get in his big tough mode and Whirl wont have any of it. He narrows his optic and stares him down.

“Wait.”

Tailgate’s vocalizer offlines with a click, though his optics narrow through his visor.

“And this smaller one doesn’t say anything either, mostly because he’s scared of fragging off the big stupid one. And so this big dumb ridiculous giant idiot wastes every opportunity to say something, and the little idiot says it to everyone BUT him, and they leave everyone in a mess. But this isn’t where the tragedy is.”

Tailgate’s optics offline. They online.

“Tragedy? What are you talking about?”

Whirl pauses, and looks at those big blue optics and does the most awful thing he could ever do.

He tells him the truth.

-  
Cyclonus was scratching himself again. 

Or at least he was trying very hard to. 

If Whirl left him alone alone for too long he’d start picking at the edge of his wrists or his knees, he’d finally stopped trying to go after his face mostly because he seemed to finally get the message that Whirl would stop him. 

Just these little gouges at his transformation seams with those claws of his, picking at the edges of his plating or near his lines. They looked like regular wear and tear if somebody didn’t take that extra look and see that they were all symmetrical and the same depth and width. 

Whirl watches them in the night cycle. 

Well, Whirl watches Cyclonus in the night cycle and if his focus happens to be very pointed, that’s entirely the big purple slagger’s fault and not his. 

He watches with his bits of metal in his claws, twisting them into something unrecognizable, but still not right. He watches without doing anything at all. It doesn’t change how loud the voice is that says he’s at fault.

Ultimately, really, what he did is very simple. 

He looked at a situation. And he made a choice. 

One of them was going to die.

Cyclonus could probably live past this. 

But if Tailgate, with those big blue optics and those little hands, tore Cyclonus apart, and ripped out his spark? He’s pretty sure there wouldn’t be much left there to live past anything. The look on his face when he’d realized that he’d been the one to hurt Cyclonus was just about the worst thing Whirl had seen recently, and he’d looked in a mirror. 

He’d half expected Tailgate to start crying. And he had. Just none of the ridiculous wailing he’d come to expect, just ribbons of light while Whirl sat there beside him, his vocalizer clicking over and over as it tried to express the horror he was experiencing. 

He’d waited until the crying stopped, he’d let Tailgate talk out what he thought he had to do. 

And then he’d made himself scarce. 

He hadn’t said goodbye. 

Which felt stupid. It felt stupid that he was….what, unhappy? He spent most of his time unhappy. Sad? Look, he knew sad and devastated and ugly like the back of his claws. This just felt…Stupid. 

So he’d sit there, feeling stupid, and Cyclonus would lay there, oblivious and recharging, and they’d both feel awful. 

Gee. Wasn’t that just beautiful.

Somewhere near morning or something close to it, Old Hornhead had finally onlined his optics. 

He looked up, and then his stupid hole face settled back into level awful melancholy. 

The point was, really, that Whirl had made a choice.

Because no one else was going to. And they were both going to go back and forth protecting each other until it killed them. And so Whirl, ridiculous, awful Whirl, made his choice. Made a choice. 

Because they’d gone and trapped him in this love story with them. 

And the problem with the real world, is that love stories don’t end well.

They never do. 

So, Whirl arcs his optic and prods at Cyclonus, and kills the ugly voice in his head again and hopes it stays dead. Wouldn’t Rung be proud. 

It is something. It has to be. 

It has to be.


End file.
